“You can ask that, if you don’t mind non-detailed answers,” he shared. “And we had some movement on a case. That movement is promising only because there’s been no movement for weeks. So, bottom line, it’s good.”

“Great,” I said, before I asked, “Where’s Cleo?”

“Hiding and preparing her complaint there’s someone in the house that divides attention from her, which she’ll add to her ongoing, active, but contradictory complaint about not having the house to herself where I only visit to feed her and appear when she’s feeling like getting some love.”

That didn’t get a giggle.

It just made me laugh.

He shoved the cucumber aside, grabbed a carrot and asked nonchalantly, “How’s your dad?”

Dang.

He looked at me out of the sides of his eyes, “Honey, we’re gonna have to go there.”

I sighed.

Then I said, “He was a jerk.”

And he was.

Not calling-me-a-whore jerk, but, say, in the mid-to-lower range of Dad’s multiple levels of jerkiness.

Axl looked down at the carrot in a manner I knew he intended to look down at the carrot so he didn’t do something else, like press me for details, demand I never see my father again, or get one of his six guns and go shoot him in the kneecap.

“I like to think that it’s because he’s lonely and he misses me,” I said.

“But?” Axl prompted me for what I obviously didn’t say.

“He wasn’t pleased he had to order pizza. Not that he doesn’t like pizza. Just that he’s into control. And when I show at his house, he knows he’s controlling me. And I don’t know if you know, but he has diabetes. The kind you have to closely manage. So when he doesn’t check his blood sugar or take his insulin, it’s a way to control me. It’s all an exercise in control, even though I’m not ten anymore and even then, the way he did it wasn’t okay. Mostly because controlling anyone isn’t okay at all, ever.”

Axl spoke no words.

But the carrot was getting decimated.

“I know, I know,” I guessed his reaction. “He can take care of himself. Or he could get someone to come in and do a few things to look after him without leaning so heavily on me. He has money, not a lot of it, but he has a pretty good income from a work-from-home job. He’s got a nest egg. It was bigger before he had a couple of hospital visits that bit into it. But we sold his house and downsized him—”

He turned just his head my way. “You mean you sold his house and downsized him.”

I rubbed my lips together.

“That means yes,” he said, watching my mouth.

I nodded.

Then I said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”